Forum:Consolidation and cooperation?
I'd like to start by saying hi to everyone here. This is my first forum post, although I have been active on the wiki the past few weeks and have communicated with a few of you. I am really impressed by the work that was done and continues to be done here. However, there is a ton of work still to be done. There are at least 750 wanted pages and those are only generated by links. I don't know if this issue has been brought up before, or if there is some history or baggage that I am unaware of. It seems to me, however, that a lot of work is being duplicated on multiple sites. I saw a blog post where someone mentioned porting over the concordance. I believe it would be in the interest of this wiki and all WoT fans to try to consolidate the work being done across the web, and try to get everyone working on one site, or at least contributing to multiple sites when writing new articles. I have found a total of 7 sites, inlcuding this one, that catalogue, to some extent or another, the People, Places, and Things of Randland. Perhaps we can contact the admins of those sites (at least 1 is Wikipedia, so that is out) to talk about porting over data with permission, and collaborating on future work. These sites include: *Wikipedia *The Wheel of Time Concordance *Bob Kluttz's Encyclopedia WOT *Karl Hammond's Compendium of Wheel of Time Characters *Paul Postuma's Compendium of Weaponry and Military Costuming of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time *TarValon.net's Tar Valon Library If anyone has any thoughts on this (for or against) and how to go about doing it, please reply to this post.Joe 04:28, February 7, 2011 (UTC) :Hi there :) :I think what you suggest is a good idea in theory, but I think you are missing the essence of the WoT Wiki. The idea of a wiki is that you are continuously adding to it to make it better. Wot Wiki isn't supposed to be a tucked-away-on-a-shelf-never-to-be-added-to-again type of work - what makes it fun is that there are always updates to be made. I've found a lot of the time when I have a specific page in mind to update, I get side-tracked by unrelated info - for example, yesterday I was looking for something to do with the High Inquisitor, and ended up updating Stedding Jentoine. That's what makes Wot Wiki fun to me. :Why don't you use these sites as stepping stones for updating pages here? All you would have to do is use a certain page as a starting point, look it up in the books to verify it's correct, and then put it into your own words to update it here. I know the amount of work left to is pretty daunting, but hey... the Tower wasn't built in a day, haha :) :Daea 07:27, February 7, 2011 (UTC) ::While it is fine to reference those sites and even use them in creating and updating pages, the thing we run into is copyright issues. Interestingly enough, Wikipedia and Wikia have compatible licences, so any info from there is fine copy over here. The flip side of that is Wikipedia is written from a real-world point of view where as this site is written from a in-universe point of view, for the most part. All of the other sites are copyrighted to their individual creaters and contributors. I'll contact the various sites and see what I can get set up, but I do know from past interactions with similar sites that this might be a long shot. While I wasn't here at the time, I do know of an instance where we tried to copy over content from the Thirteenth Depository, but they didn't allow it. I know that we do link to both the Encyclopedia WOT and Tar Valon's library on character pages and chapter pages. ::I do know that it seems like we are kind of duplicating effort and we still have a long way to go with regards to completeness. Please don't take any of this as disgouraging. If anything, think of this as a challenge to try and be the site that those other sites come to for info. ----[[User:Mainphramephreak| Willie]] - [[User Talk:Mainphramephreak|''HtS]] 15:19, February 7, 2011 (UTC) : I've had the same thought while browsing other sources of WoT information. It would be nice to have an "official" place to contribute such content where it could lend additional credibility to the information. But at the same time, I'm a bit leary of storing ''everything in a single place. Communities die, websites get removed, and databases crash no matter how large or active they are. :-/ : It would be nice if more of those WoT resources were named a little better, though... like Collam Daan or such. Aside from that, I would choose TarValon.net as the resource to contribute information to if it comes down to a vote. However, it looks like their membership is a bit more complex than what I would prefer to be involved with at this point in time. : Oh, there is also The Thirteenth Depository : ~ Polegnyn 00:10, March 4, 2011 (UTC)